Will Work for Book Reviews

“Publishing a book is easy these days. All you have to do is press a button.”

Yeah.

Publishing a book is easy these days (in electronic formats, at least). It’s just the writing/editing bit (and in the case of an anthology, organizing) that takes a bit of time. I just did that and it felt amazing to get it across the finish.

Now what?

I was fortunate enough to get to work with an amazing group of co-authors. It was a lot of work, but it was work that I thoroughly enjoyed. But now I have to do something else. I have to get it into people’s hands. I thought about doing a private sale like the Wu Tang Clan’s to bring in a lot of notoriety for the WPC, but to tell the truth, that was just going to be a setup for a Martin Shkreli punchline, and I think his 15 minutes ran out a few weeks ago…

Where were we?

One of the things that’s said to be important for new books is to have a handful of reviews for potential readers to peruse. Big publishing houses have relationships with reviewers, so this is just part of the process for them. Fledgling houses (like ours) don’t have such relationships, so your left with a couple of choices:

Connect with professional reviewers in the hopes that they’ll take up your book (Over 1,000,000 books were published in the U.S. alone in 2009, so the odds of getting the time of day as an unknown is vanishingly small.)

Pay for reviews

Somehow get your early readers to provide them

Option 1 is something that I have to work on in my role as publisher, but it’s going to take time. I believe we’ll slowly build a reputation for putting together quality offerings, so it should just be a matter of putting in the appropriate effort and being a little patient. (I am not patient.)

Option 2 is basically a non-starter. I’m sure there are plenty of great reviewers who work in this model, but in doing research on this option, I found too many offerings that felt unsavory. Reviewers need to get paid for their work–there’s no doubt in my mind about that–but my gut says they need to get paid by a third party for it to be a fair deal. I don’t want to pay for a glowing review. I want to earn it.

That brings us to Option 3 (Beg your readers!). This is where YOU (could) come in!

I should take a step back and level set here. I’m not looking for a 1,500 word review set for the pages of the New York Times or the London Review of Books. (Although that would be pretty cool.) We just need a handful of short, honest reviews on the book’s page on Amazon.

Thought it was pretty good? – Great!

Loved it? – Even better!

Hated it? – Hey, as long as you’re being fair/honest, we can’t complain. (Okay, we might complain a little, but give us a break, we’re human.)

A couple of bucks for 37 essays by a thoughtful, engaged group, on one of the defining issues of our time. All that I ask in return for the discount is that you consider sharing your thoughts after reading it. (We’re in great need of reviews to help establish credibility via the book’s Kindle page.) So if you could hit the number of stars that feels appropriate at the end of the book, and share a few sentences on what you thought of it, that would be really helpful. (Did you learn something? Did you change your perspective on one or more issues? Were you my 3rd grade teacher who thinks everyone should buy our book because I had such nice manners?) If you don’t enjoy the read. If you don’t find it credible. If you feel it was a waste of your time. Please do warn the others! I’m just looking for honest assessments. I hope that’s a fair ask.

Also, if you’re interested in doing an interview, please leave a note in the comments. Thanks for reading.

-Chris

Before you go, here’s a list of the book’s chapters with links to each of the author’s pages on Twitter. Check em out. It’s a really interesting group.

WPC Book 1: What do we do about inequality?
1. TO ADDRESS INEQUALITY, THINK GLOBAL | Dylan Matthews